Issued by 2025 Magazine

Plastic pollution in farm land : a crisis uncovered

Science

AUTHOR : Luca NIZZETTO, Senior Research Scientist, the Norwegian institute for Water Research

Plasticulture Magazine publishes the full interview that is available on the Research Consortium website Papillons-Horizon 2020. “We don’t have evidence that European soils are much better than in China” explains Luca Nizzetto.

Luca, what led you to focus on microplastics as a research topic ?

Luca Nizzetto : Plastic pollution has been a hot topic in the past years with regard to the marine environment. In 2014, the Environmental Agency of Norway commissioned a report to evaluate the sources of microplastics entering the marine environment. We realised that land-based sources often end up in wastewater treatment plants and are mostly retained in sewage sludge, which is often used as a soil amending agent in agriculture. This process results in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastics in Europe to farm soils.

There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.